


Go Big or Go Extinct

by callunavulgari



Series: Heather's Favorites [23]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Loss, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 11:15:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1603163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The American government is calling it an anomaly, along with the rest of the world. They have six months—six months of rebuilding, of Nico making desperate jumps back and forth between the Underworld and Camp Half-Blood to pass on messages to loved ones.</p><p>They have six months to hope—six months to grieve—before Hundun destroys Manila.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Big or Go Extinct

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azartti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azartti/gifts).



> A good long while ago, azartti gave me a prompt for either Percy/Nico/Annabeth Pacific Rim or Maze Runner fic. At the time that I started this, I hadn't finished the Maze Runner, so I went with Pacific Rim goodness. Fair warning, the POV shifts to Percy about a quarter through the story, which isn't at all because I got blocked and came back to it three months later. Whoops.

As it turns out, Nico is in California when Trespasser makes landfall on the morning of August 10th. Sort of. The Underworld both is and isn’t under the city of Los Angeles, same as Olympus both is and isn’t above New York City.  
  
“Are you okay?” Annabeth asks him frantically six days later, via Iris Message. She’s panicked, her eyes wide and her hands trembling. “Camp Jupiter was evacuated, don’t worry, Hazel’s fine,” she goes on to explain and he stares at her, because at this point, he knows nothing other than the fact that the EZ Death line is unusually crowded.  
  
“Annabeth,” he says shortly, holding up a hand to cut off her rambling. It’s strange, because Annabeth isn’t normally a rambler—she saves that for the lesser peons, like him and Percy—and if he weren’t half so exhausted, he would make note of this. As it is, he hasn’t slept in three days and has absolutely no idea what she’s going on about. He tells her as much.  
  
She blinks at him, taken aback, and he can see the moment that she hesitates, biting down on her lip and fumbling for another drachma.  
  
“Nico,” Annabeth says in a soft voice. “Don’t you know what happened?”  
  
.  
  
Los Angeles is far enough away from the San Francisco Bay that they got little more than the aftershocks and some minor radiation. Camp Jupiter wasn’t quite so lucky. His father is the one who manages to convince him not to go—not to shadow travel there in the hopes of finding survivors.  
  
“There aren’t any,” he tells Nico. There’s a hint of pity in his expression, which is what makes the bottom drop out of Nico’s stomach. “Everyone who didn’t get out in time died when the missiles dropped.”  
  
Nico decides against questioning him. If anyone would know, its his dad.  
  
.  
  
Nico hadn’t spent much time in Camp Jupiter, beyond visiting Hazel, but it’s still hard to think of it being _gone_. It was _big_ , so much bigger than Camp Half-Blood was. He thinks of all the families that had lived there, all the happy couples who’d thought they’d found a safe place. Given another year, one of those families could have been Annabeth and Percy.  
  
He pretends that Persephone isn’t giving him a look full of pity when he’s sick all over the walkway after he sees someone he recognizes.  
  
A day later, it’s a lot easier to imagine the rubble of the camp when he sees just how full Camp Half-Blood is.  
  
He wanders, for a little while, sticking to the shadows. His stomach churns, to see the injuries, and he is hopelessly out of his depth here. Why would someone need a son of Hades in the aftermath of something like this?  
  
.  
  
Annabeth finds him later, sitting on the stoop of his cabin—the cabin that he’s never once used—and watching Piper feed a little girl a tiny piece of ambrosia. She sits down next to him, almost too close, and doesn’t say anything, just watches with him.  
  
“I didn’t even know anything was wrong until you called,” he says, eventually. He doesn’t know why he’s telling her this—she knows. She was there to see the way his expression crumbled when she explained things. She might not have seen him break down after, when he’d finally ventured down to the EZ Death line and seen the half-familiar faces, but she knows.  
  
She just nods and scoots closer, hesitating for a fraction of a second before setting her hand on his knee. He lets her keep it there.  
  
“Did—” she starts, cutting herself off when her voice comes out thin and cracked. She clears her throat and starts again. “Did you see Reyna down there?” she asks, hesitantly, and for a moment, he sees red.  
  
“No,” he whispers, his eyes darting from person to person, like he’ll spot a familiar dark braid in the crowd. “She’s missing?”  
  
Annabeth bites her lip and nods. He carefully doesn’t think of his father telling him that everyone who wasn’t evacuated did actually die—doesn’t think of how easy it would have been to miss her in the massive influx of souls.  
  
“She’ll turn up,” he insists and tries desperately to believe it.  
  
.  
  
The American government is calling it an anomaly, along with the rest of the world. They have six months—six months of rebuilding, of Nico making desperate jumps back and forth between the Underworld and Camp Half-Blood to pass on messages to loved ones.  
  
They have six months to hope—six months to grieve—before Hundun destroys Manila.  
  
.  
  
“We have to do something,” Jason tells them. It’s a quiet night, more than a year after the first attack, and Nico is watching the stars, his hand clasped tight around Hazel’s. She’s like marble next to him, still as a statue and hard as steel. The firelight catches on her scars, turning them into a ragged landscape of shadows and skin. She’d lost an eye trying to evacuate a group of kids, but he thinks that what she hates the most is the burns, a sharp reminder that Frank is gone.  
  
“Yeah, but what exactly should we be doing?” Percy asks him from Nico’s other side. “Monsters are one thing, but skyscraper sized alien Godzillas? We’re gonna have a hard time fighting those.”  
  
“The Jaeger Program,” Annabeth cuts in quietly. Nico blinks and tears his eyes away from Andromeda’s Belt, glancing in her direction. She’s been quiet, lately, ever since Nico finally found her father and brothers in Elysium. She hadn’t asked him to try to revive them, her eyes going blank before walking away.  
  
Everyone’s looking at her now, curious, and there’s that hesitation again. He’s unfamiliar with an Annabeth Chase who’s uncomfortable in the face of anything; it makes him nervous.  
  
“There was a conference in Seoul last month, after the fourth kaiju attacked Sydney,” she explains, her knuckles going white around Percy’s hand. He winces, but refuses to pull away. “An idea was proposed that—well, giant robots, basically.”  
  
Everyone blinks at her. “Giant mechs,” Leo eventually says, deadpan. “Like Gundams.”  
  
“Yeah, pretty much.”  
  
“All right, then,” Leo snorts. “Nice to know they’ve got a plan.”  
  
.  
  
There is no prophecy about this. They know because they ask Rachel and she just looks at them, about as unnerved as they feel, and tells them that she has no idea.  
  
So they make a decision.  
  
.  
  
In the end, only two of them get into the program. Two pairs anyway, since by the time they _actually_ get there and convince the necessary people that they’re suitable, Caitlin Lightcap has already come up with the two pilot system.  
  
Annabeth and Percy were expected. They’ve been extensions of each other for so long that when they’re finally proved to be overwhelmingly drift compatible, they just shrug. They hadn’t expected anything different.  
  
They _don’t_ expect Piper and Jason to be _in_ compatible.

They expect Thalia even less, striding in with her head held high, looking almost too young with her forever fifteen body. She narrows her eyes in Jason’s direction, ignoring the people hovering over her shoulder, saying she can’t be here, and jerks her chin in the direction of the conn-pod.  
  
“C’mon, baby bro,” she tells him, smirking. “We got this.”  
  
.  
  
They spend years learning how to fight kaiju, years of Percy pushing down the instinct to grab the water around him and use it as a weapon. It’s not so different from fighting monsters, in the end. The instincts are all still there.  
  
With their help, the tide starts to turn.  
  
.  
  
And then everything goes wrong.  
  
.  
  
Nico appears in the conn-pod of Poseidon’s Daughter, wild-eyed and frantic, sliding right out of the shadows beside Percy. Annabeth is lax and boneless at his side, head lolling like her neck has been snapped in half, and everything is flashing lights and shouting voices and pain. Percy’s pretty sure that there’s blood dribbling from all of his orifices and without her, without Annabeth’s presence in the drift, it is tearing him apart. If she’s dead, he’ll — he doesn’t know what he’ll do.  
  
“Nico—” he gasps, not even slightly surprised that he’s hallucinating, and Nico’s head snaps up, fixing him with a dark-eyed glare. That’s how Percy knows it’s real.  
  
“Oh,” he goes, dumbly. Absentmindedly, he wipes blood from his nose and catches a glimpse of his glove from the corner of his eye, smeared red. “You’re really here.”  
  
He catches snippets of words from the Shatterdome — someone that sounds like Pentecost demanding, “How the hell did that boy get in there?”  
  
Nico goes to Annabeth first, and for a moment, Percy loves him more than life itself for that, his long, bony fingers stark white against the tan line of her throat. Percy might black out for a moment, because when he next blinks his eyes open, the shouting is louder and his jaeger is shuddering like someone wedged it between two tectonic plates. He knows that people have done this — that at least two pilots have piloted a jaeger by themselves and lived — because one of them is his boss.  
  
He blinks, slowly, eyelashes dragging wetly against his cheekbones. He wonders if they’re wet with blood or tears.  
  
“She’s alive, Percy,” Nico is telling him, which makes Percy snap his gaze over to him—  
  
He’s already got Annabeth out of her suit. She’s curled up in a corner, head pillowed on that old jacket Nico’s perpetually got shrugged over his shoulders. She looks—  
  
She looks not okay, but Nico said she’s alive, so Percy squares his shoulders, steeling himself against the sharp, biting pain in his skull, and tears his gaze away from the straps of her tanktop against her shoulders so he can focus on Nico. Nico, who is mindlessly buckling himself into Annabeth’s suit, helmet already over his head.  
  
Percy sucks in a ragged breath, and gasps, “Nico, no.”  
  
Nico pauses for the space of a moment, then goes back to sliding into Annabeth’s boots. Gods, but how did he even get the suit on by himself? They’ve got machines and a whole team designated to helping them get into their uniform, the spinal clamp alone, and he’d need relay gel, how could Nico—  
  
All around them, the jaeger trembles, like something huge has just come into contact with it.  
  
“Nico,” he tries again. “You have to take Annabeth and go, you can’t — it doesn’t work like that, we don’t even know if we’re drift compatible—”  
  
Nico quells any further arguments with a single, furious dark eye, finishes strapping himself in, and says, “There is a class four kaiju battering at your door, Percy Jackson. If I don’t do this, you _are_ going to die.”  
  
Percy stops. Doesn’t ask if Nico knows that because he had a chat with the Fates, because it doesn’t matter.  
  
“That’s fine,” he starts, biting his lip when a sharp jolt of something splits through his skull. He might die yet, just from this. Just from being hooked up to a jaeger system without Annabeth. Gods, her absence _hurts_.  
  
Nico snarls at him and says something to the Shatterdome that Percy can’t make out, but it’s snappish and pissy, and whatever it is, it makes someone start a countdown.  
  
“I’m not letting you die, Percy,” Nico tells him furiously, mouth a thin line, like he doesn’t care that he’s breaking every rule in the book by doing this — as if he doesn’t give two shits what Chiron and the gods of Olympus are going to say when they find out he shadow-traveled into a water-tight, locked jaeger in the middle of the Pacific while a dozen mortals watched.  
  
Anything that Percy could possibly say to that is firmly shoved to the back of his mind, because that’s when the countdown stops, and Percy suddenly knows exactly what it was for.  
  
Nico di Angelo’s head is nothing like Annabeth’s. His memories are full of harsh, jagged edges, his mind sharp like he’s honed it into a weapon. For a moment, Percy flounders in the face of it, and then there’s a flash of images passing him by.  
  
He sees Bianca, smaller and softer, with her hand clutched tight to Nico’s. There’s a woman beside them who has Nico’s nose and Bianca’s sharp smile, the memory fuzzy like an aged film reel, and Percy remembers that Hades had Percy’s old teacher dunk Nico and his sister into the River Lethe. This might be the one memory that made it through.  
  
Hazel goes by in the drift, hunched over and crying over something, Nico’s arm around her. Jason Grace’s lips move around a soundless vow.  
  
Percy catches flashes of what must be the Lotus Casino, graveyards with moonlight reflected off headstones, the EZ death line, filled with souls that were too familiar. Annabeth laughs, head thrown back, and Percy’s grinning back at her, helpless with adoration as Nico watches, something soft growing inside his chest—  
  
He snaps back to himself and it’s like getting hit by lightning, like getting tossed around by a kaiju for hours. It aches, in a curious way, like trying to hold up the world with someone at his side, but his head isn’t trying half so hard to split itself in two now, so he cautiously counts it as a win.  
  
He cranes his neck, looking for Nico, even though he can feel him in his head. It’s so weird having someone who isn’t Annabeth there, feels like whiplash. Nico looks dazed, but determined, flicking a look over to Percy the moment he recovers.  
  
They share a quiet moment, soaking in the feel of each other. Percy can feel Nico—could talk to him without even opening his mouth right now, if he wanted—so he knows that Nico is worrying about Annabeth, about Percy, about everyone on the coast; that he’s thinking about the EZ death line swelling again, half-choked with dread. He thinks about seeing Annabeth’s curls in the line, and Percy doesn’t know which of them makes the small, choked sound. Both, maybe.  
  
“They won’t get her,” Nico tells him. “I won’t let them take her.”  
  
Percy laughs and clenches his teeth when the kaiju does something terrible sounding to the outer hull. “Pretty sure you can’t stop death, Nico.”  
  
The grin Nico sends him is sharp as knives around the edges, fury and something else, something that promises a swift, painful end to anything that goes against him. “Try me,” he laughs, like it’s a challenge he can’t wait to win.  
  
“—Don’t think that you won’t be explaining this later, Jackson,” Tendo tells him, his voice startling them both. He sounds weary, voice raspy like he’s been shouting to get their attention for awhile. “Because this is some fucked up shit, okay? But you and ghost boy’s sync rates are good.”  
  
Percy barks out a laugh, because it’s funny — brings to mind an image of a younger Nico, hard-eyed and declaring himself the Ghost King — and Nico replies with something scathing that may or may not be out loud.  
  
_Let’s do this_ , he thinks, and Nico sends back a jumble of complex emotions in place of words. It’s okay though, because within that tangle of emotion is a knot of curling determination and the knowledge that they can do this, two children of the big three, and if the cat is already out of the bag — well.  
  
Percy smirks and reaches for the water around them.  
  
.  
  
Nico goes back with him, because he can’t just shadow travel out of the jaeger and leave Percy and an unconscious Annabeth stranded in the Pacific. The way back is quiet, punctuated with little flares of emotion dotted through the drift. He’s nervous, they both are. The mist goes a long way to protect the minds of mortals, but this is something else. This is unforeseen tsunamis working in their favor and earthquakes all along the ocean floor. This is a kaiju swallowed up by the earth like so much damp paper tearing and knitting itself back together again.  
  
The Shatterdome is chaos. Annabeth is whisked off immediately and Percy tries to ground himself when he sees her on the stretcher, blood in her hair. It’s hard, but the ghost of Nico is still in his head, assuring him that she’ll be fine — _she’ll be fine, calling you seaweed brain again in no time_ — and the boy himself attached to Percy’s side like a barnacle, even when the strike raiders and Pentecost himself tries to pry them apart for interrogation.  
  
They tell them that Nico’s a friend who stowed away in the conn-pod, that he was worried and knows his way around machines. It’s a flimsy excuse that leaves Pentecost eying them both with suspicion, but then he’s interrogating them about the earthquakes and tsunamis, which is harder.  
  
By the time Pentecost and the medical team examining Percy gives them the okay to go, they’re exhausted, bleary-eyed with sleep.  
  
Annabeth’s fine, according to medical. A concussion combined with a broken collarbone, but she isn’t going to be dying any time soon.  
  
“How’d you know?” Percy asks Nico when they’ve reached the privacy of his and Annabeth’s quarters. Nico slumps onto Percy’s bed, shimmying back until he thunks up against the wall. He goes boneless against the pillows, regarding Percy through half-closed eyes.  
  
“You were all over the tv, dude,” he says, shrugging.  
  
Percy raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but that wouldn’t tell you that anything was wrong—”  
  
“I just did, okay?” Nico goes, defensive, eyes glinting like he’s thinking of disappearing into the shadows. It makes Percy panic, seeing that look on his face and all he knows is that he desperately does not want to be alone right now. So he’s not really thinking when he flings himself onto the bed and half onto Nico himself, fingers closing around Nico’s wrist like he can ground him there.  
  
Nico snorts and spits out a mouthful of Percy’s hair, shifting into a position that’ll better accommodate Percy’s weight. “You know that wouldn’t stop me, right? You’d just go with me,” he tells Percy. “Besides, I’m too tired to shadow travel right now.”  
  
The tension in Percy’s shoulders eases up. “Okay,” he says, rolling off of Nico when the boy nudges him.  
  
He stares at the ceiling for a bit, not wanting to close his eyes. He can’t explain it, but as tired as he is, he doesn’t want to go to sleep. He’s too afraid that when he wakes up, Nico will be gone again, vanished into the ether.  
  
“I can’t believe that worked,” he mutters after what feels like hours.  
  
Nico snorts again. “Me neither.”  
  
“They believed us,” Percy murmurs, voice thick with incredulity.  
  
Nico turns to look at him, so Percy does the same, rolling over so that he’s facing Nico instead of the ceiling. They’re inches apart, Percy realizes. This close, he can smell the sweat on Nico’s skin, can see the tiny, almost invisible freckles across the bridge of his nose. He could kiss him with the slightest change in angle. He wants to.  
  
“No, they didn’t,” Nico is saying, giving Percy a hard look that is _all_ Annabeth. “They just didn’t want to believe what their eyes were telling them.”  
  
“Think it was the mist?”  
  
Nico hums, eyelashes fluttering when he finds a more comfortable position against the pillow. “I think it was humans being humans.”  
  
They lapse into silence again, but neither of them slip off into sleep. They watch each other instead, and it should be awkward, but with the memory of Nico’s touch inside his skull, Percy can’t bring himself to let it become so.  
  
Percy’s fingers tremble when he brings them up some time later to trace over the soft swell of Nico’s lower lip. The pads of his thumb catches on the corner, dipping in just enough to feel the wet heat inside.  
  
Nico makes a noise, soft and plaintive, that succeeds in drawing Percy’s gaze away from his lips and up to wide, dark eyes. Percy licks his lips and watches Nico’s pupils swell as he follows the movement. Percy guides his thumb across the velvet heat, traces it around Nico’s mouth like he desperately wants to memorize the shape of it.  
  
“Can I?” he asks in a murmur.  
  
Nico’s watching him, hypnotized, and is nodding even as he whispers, “What about Annabeth?”  
  
Percy shrugs with one shoulder, drawing closer to Nico’s mouth, magnetized. He thinks of the shrewd expression that had stolen over her face during that first drift after Percy had realized, when his mind had lingered on the image of Nico caught up in a rare bout of laughter, head thrown back, the long line of his throat begging to be kissed. How she’d told him, _I don’t mind sharing you, not if it means I get to keep you._  
  
“She knows,” Percy says in a choked voice, because Nico is still waiting for an answer.  
  
“Then _yes_ ,” Nico hisses, grabbing Percy by the hips and tugging him in.  
  
.  
  
Nico as a person is as passionate as he is demanding, and the same is true for him as a lover. He kisses like he’s trying to win a battle, as if Percy’s a toy or a weapon that he’s just waiting for someone to yank away. They skate the line of too much, too fast, and they’re exhausted enough that while it’s enthusiastic, it’s also sloppy, uncoordinated, and over much too quickly.  
  
“We’re doing that again tomorrow,” Nico tells him fiercely, just daring Percy to disagree.  
  
There’s come all over his belly and his bones ache nearly as much as his skull does, so he just sighs and cuddles into Nico, pushing his face in between the wings of his shoulderblades.  
  
“‘Course we are,” he slurs sleepily. He wouldn’t have it any other way.  
  
.  
  
Annabeth takes one look at them the next day, hickeys smeared into their skin, mouths still kiss-swollen and red from that morning, and shakes her head.  
  
“Dumb as rocks, the both of you,” she says.


End file.
